Mon Jan 28 2002 10:55Gee, I wish it were ten o'clock:
I'm long back from Texas and Crummy is, once again, down. I've been writing NYCB entries about Texas and I figure I might as well put them here while I wait and then repost them on the main site. So stay tuned.

In The Ballad of Michigan J. I
have some fun naming space aliens (Zcat and Grep) after Unix utilities. It turns out
I'm not the only one to do this sort of thing; witness
The Saga of Argc and Argv.

One thing that happened to me in Texas was that my uncle Robert
showed me Diablo II. Whee! It's quite fun, and I got up to level 11
without much trouble (then I went back to San Francisco; that's not
where trouble abruptly started). I went away thinking there was a
Linux version of Diablo II and I could continue to play it, but I
couldn't find any evidence of such a beast. Oh well. I'll just have to
do productive things with my time.

Now, a famous
article compares Diablo II to Nethack ("But what about the
Amulet of Yendor?"). On the other hand, Diablo II's mechanical
similarities to Angband have so far passed largely unnoticed. Until
now!

In Diablo II you have a base camp exactly like Angband's town
(complete with black market and "your house"). The only differences:
there are fewer shops (because Diablo II has no food, digging
equipment, or books of magic) and no hostile monsters in the base
camp.

The inventory system is the same annoying slot-based thing as
Angband's, though its graphical object-size nature makes it both more
restrictive (though actually less annoying). You can only stack
scrolls, but you have a few extra slots reserved for potions which
makes it more bearable.

The combination of the above two items means that in both games
you spend most of your time gating to a dangerous place, killing a
bunch of monsters until you've got all the good items you can carry,
then gating back to town and selling your good items. Only in very rare circumstances and only for short periods of time does this ever happen in Nethack.

Diablo II's randomly generated magic items are like nothing in
Nethack but similar to the randomly generated artifacts in Angband.

The quest and wilderness system is not like Angband proper, but
Zangband has many of the same features. However, I won't push the
similarities any further.

In one of the bizarre twists that marks my life, Robert used to
play the Palm game iRogue a
lot. The author of iRogue, Bridget Spitznagel, also ported
robotfindskitten to the Palm.